Slight Return

Call it a reboot: a revision of Revisions. This space has lain fallow now for more than three months, due to a departure, hinted at in the last post, from New York, which had been my home for almost six years, and my home in a sense that cannot be measured in years; and due as well to the assumption of a new set of responsibilities, a new life. It is a life that has nothing to do with books, literature, or publishing: the content and the premise of Revisions: the heart of the matter. It has pulled me away.

This page was originally conceived as a piece of advertising: as a means to build an infrastructure of interest around my debut novel, CITY OF STRANGERS, published last summer. Now that the book’s publication cycle has come and gone, that reason for this page’s existence has become obsolete; there is nothing new to sell. (Which doesn’t mean you cannot still buy CITY OF STRANGERS from your local bookseller, or from Amazon.)

But. Revisions was never meant to be an author blog; it was never meant to catalog the ins and outs of readings, of meeting other authors, of the coincidences and odd ephemera one discovers upon Googling one’s own name; it wasn’t meant to record those moments, like the undiminishing thrill of seeing one’s name on a spine in a bookshop, which attend the publication of a first novel. None of that is particularly interesting; no more interesting than a stranger’s diary. From its beginning, Revisions was intended to house longer, more serious writing, and I find myself wanting to preserve it as a home for the publication of occasional essays on literature and writing. And so it remains. The schedule of publication cannot return to a pace of once or twice a week, but I hope to muster once or twice a month, with a new piece soon to come.

As part of the reboot I have changed the image at the top of the page. Where a detail from Anselm Kiefer’s The Renowned Orders of the Night once was, now hangs a detail from Robert Motherwell’s Reconciliation Elegy. The painting itself – massive, looming, spectacular – lives in the East Building of the National Gallery, in Washington, DC. It is one of the best things I have encountered in this, a city which, however temporarily, I am forced to imagine as home.